CARDINAL REINHARD MARX WITH POPE FRANCIS
Posted on 02/09/2022 7:35:44 AM PST by SeekAndFind
CARDINAL REINHARD MARX WITH POPE FRANCIS
A prominent Roman Catholic Church leader in Germany has said that he believes priests should be allowed to get married, opposing centuries of mandated celibacy for clergy.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the archbishop of Munich and a reformist ally of Pope Francis, told the German publication Sueddeutsche Zeitung that he supported clerical marriage as part of reforms to battle sex abuse.
“For some priests, it would be better if they were married — not just for sexual reasons, but because it would be better for their life and they wouldn’t be lonely,” stated Marx, as reported by The Associated Press. “We must hold this discussion.”
While Marx stressed he is not totally opposed to celibacy, he said he believed that “it would be better for everyone to create the possibility of celibate and married priests." He questioned “whether it should be taken as a basic precondition for every priest.”
Last month, the Munich law firm Westpfahl Spilker Wastl produced a 1,000-page report finding nearly 500 victims of abuse by church figures in the Munich archdiocese from 1945 to 2019.
The report garnered major attention in part because Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, then known as Joseph Ratzinger, served as archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982.
A point of outrage, according to the Catholic News Agency, was that Ratzinger was present for a meeting that sought to transfer a priest with several allegations of abuse to his diocese. The emeritus pope issued a "heartfelt request for forgiveness" in a statement issued through the Vatican this week but denied wrongdoing.
German Bishop Stefan Oster defended Ratzinger, arguing that the meeting involved referring the priest to the diocese to receive mental treatment and that Ratzinger had “entrusted himself to collaborators who committed a capital error on a decisive point.”
“We were and are all too much a part of a system — and so was Archbishop Ratzinger at the time,” explained Oster, as quoted by CNA.
Although the Roman Catholic Church has mandated celibacy for its priests since the Medieval Era, in rare circumstances it provides exemptions. For example, married clergy from the Episcopal Church can be ordained in the Catholic Church and maintain their marital union.
In 2019, the Vatican gave serious consideration to allowing older, married men to become priests in remote areas like the Amazon region in South America in response to a clergy shortage.
However, in the February 2020 papal exhortation “Querida Amazonia,” which was centered on matters of the Amazon region, Pope Francis did not directly address the issue.
If an Orthodox priest divorces, can they get married again? I know they have to be married before they become priests.
Freegards
RE: I know they have to be married before they become priests.
Is this so? My understanding is that marriage is a FREE CHOICE for Orthodox priests, not a requirement. You are ALLOWED to marry but you are NOT REQUIRED to marry.
While there are certainly important similarities between the theologies of world’s largest and second-largest Christian Churches—for example, our understanding of the nature of Communion—there are also crucial differences that still impede reunification more than a thousand years after the tragedy of the Great Schism.
Moreover, it is a misnomer to say that Orthodox priests can marry. They can be married, and indeed, most Orthodox priests are. But a priest can’t marry while a priest. If he wishes to have a family life, he must get hitched before he is ordained to the deaconate, the penultimate step before becoming a priest.
I bring this up because of the ongoing debate within Catholic circles—pushed energetically by the Church’s internal and external critics—about whether to revoke the rule requiring priest celibacy. The regulation was formally established at the Council of Trent in 1563 after centuries of controversy over the issue of priests and marriage. Prior to Trent, the Catholic Church took the same approach to the question of priestly marriage as the Orthodox Church did (and does today). If the priestly celibacy were no longer required, the Catholic Church would likely return to its former practice.
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that marriage was a requirement. I just meant that they couldn’t marry after ordination. But I don’t know what happens if a priest gets divorced. Can a divorced priest marry again? The bishops are always unmarried and usually come from the celibate religious orders to my understanding.
As far as the debate about the discipline of celibacy, from my observation liberal Catholics invariably want the discipline lifted. Try to find one pro-abortion, gay marriage and priestess type Catholic but who also thinks the discipline of celibacy is valuable and should be preserved.
Freegards
That is probably true!
CANON 16That and public relations:
It is beyond doubt that ecclesiastical honors are bestowed not in consideration of blood relationship but of merit, and the Church of God does not look for any successor with hereditary rights, but demands for its guidance and for the administration of its offices upright, wise, and religious persons. Wherefore, in virtue of our Apostolic authority we forbid that anyone appropriate or presume to demand on the plea of hereditary right churches, prebends, deaneries, chaplaincies, or any ecclesiastical offices. If anyone, prompted by dishonesty or animated by ambition, dare attempt this, he shall be duly punished and his demands disregarded.
CANON 6
We also decree that those who in the subdiaconate and higher orders have contracted marriage or have concubines, be deprived of their office and ecclesiastical benefice. For since they should be and be called the temple of God, the vessel of the Lord, the abode of the Holy Spirit, it is unbecoming that they indulge in marriage and in impurities.
Orthodox and Eastern rite married men can be ordained, as can some in the Latin rite.
However, once ordained, they are not permitted to marry. If a unmarried man is ordained, or if an ordained man becomes a widower or divorced (even with annulment), he is not permitted to remarry.
So the headline was wrong, but it doesn’t seem, from the article, that they are considering allowing priests to marry. They seem to be considering allowed more married men to become priests.
Take a look at the Wikipedia article on the history of clerical celibacy. The requirement for clerics to abstain from serial realtions goes back long before Lateran II, to the early 4th Century council of Elvira in Spain.
More than a thousand years earlier than that.
Whatever the impact of the Council of Elvira, its ban on clerical marriage didn’t translate into fuller practice across the church. Where celibacy did take hold was in monasticism, which makes sense when considering property.
Innocent III was consolidating power across Europe, and seizing ecclesiastic property was core to that program. To do it, he had to ban clerical marriage. The Protestant Reformation, especially in Bavaria and Germany, spread as much by the words and works of church reformers as by the opportunity for local princes to seize church land and legal claims, especially monasteries.
As for my views on clerical celibacy, I think it’s a beautiful thing — insofar as it doesn’t lead to or protect clerical homosexuality and pederasty, which was imbed in the diocese where I grew up.
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